Why must they lose to the Mariners?

Seriously. This is embarrassing. Oliver Perez getting smacked around by the likes of Kenji Johjima (who is a catcher) and Raul Ibanez (for whom it was his first home run the year off a lefty).

David Wright had the night off, and Carlos Beltran was tossed in the fourth inning for arguing, so the lineup card behind Reyes is pretty grim.

Update:
10-0 now. Awesome.

Talk to'em Russ

Though Russ Feingold's decision to stay out of the presidential race was driven by a clear-eyed appreciation for the fact he almost certainly wasn't going to win, I was pretty disappointed anyway. Obama didn't look like he was going to take this stuff seriously and now I think it's pretty clear he won't. If Russ had stayed in a few primaries he might have been able to raise the issue's profile; maybe enough to entice Barack to join him on the right side of the Constitution. How hard is it to be anti-illegal wiretapping?

Via Kos.

What Digby said

I'd been getting a little sketched out by Digby recently, owing largely to the fact that her estimation of the injustice done to Hillary Clinton in the primaries was much greater than my own.

But when the need arises to kick The Politico in the teeth, which is often, and one of the highest callings a blogger can answer, she does excellent work.

UPDATE:
While the "What Digby said" concept is of course a registered trademark of the Baby Blue Cherub, I actually beat him to the approving link by 13 minutes, and didn't just steal his post wholesale and flesh it out a little. Apparently everybody and their mother (at least those mothers who are aware of the internet) linked to that Digby post. Got memeorandum on lock.

Las Vegas Sands and Tom DeLay

I know, it's hard to believe that a billionaire casino magnate and an unbelievably corrupt Republican congressman could have anything to do with one another, but Connie Bruck of the New Yorker says it's so.

Sheldon Adelson is the CEO and majority shareholder of Las Vegas Sands, which is worth almost $20 billion, which makes him the third richest man in America. The article is primarily about his tireless advocacy for (right-wing views of) Israel, but it also has good backstory on the deal that made his company what it is, namely the first and the biggest casino in Macau. They were not the only casino company willing to build a casino where China goes to gamble, but it appears they got that privilege in part because Adelson and DeLay are friends.

Sands was angling for the casino concession at the same time the Chinese were angling to host the 2008 Olympics. Though his city was considered the favorite, the mayor of Beijing was concerned about a bill being pushed in the House by a Democrat (natch) calling for Congress to oppose the selection of Beijing on account of human rights abuses or some noise.

Here is the account of the president of the company in a sworn deposition:

“About three hours later DeLay calls and he tells Sheldon, ‘You’re in luck,’ ” he continued, “ ‘because we’ve got a military-spending bill. . . . We’re not going to be able to move the bill, so you tell your mayor that he can be assured that this bill will never see the light of day.’ So Sheldon goes and he goes to the mayor and he says, ‘The bill will never see the light of day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

All else equal, that conversation probably didn't hurt Sheldon's chances of becoming a multi-billionaire.

Eric Savitz is clueless

There's a news item from today that isn't strictly baseball or politics related, but I'm going to write about it anyway because it's interesting and I have pretty broad editorial freedom.

There's a company called Microvision (ticker: MVIS) which makes, or rather is planning to make, little projectors that go into cell phones, allowing them to work like little projection TVs. Cool? Possibly, but that's neither here nor there.

What's interesting is that today someone wrote a post at finance blog aggregator SeekingAlpha which argued that (and I haven't done any fact checking here) Microvision is going to get crushed by a much bigger company (Texas Instruments) which is working on a similar product and is closer than Microvision to having it ready for mass production. Apparently a lot of people found it convincing, because the stock was down almost 12 percent today.

Despite the fact that the author, a Mr. Liam Mulcahy, disclosed at the end of the post that he worked for a hedge fund that is short (i.e. betting against) Microvision, the in-house tech blogger at Barron's, Eric Savitz, decided it was worth having a little hissyfit over.

"[Mulcahy's assertions] may well be true, but the fuzzy ID for Mulcahy - and the willingness of Seeking Alpha to post material of unclear origin - makes me a little queasy."

Anybody with an even passing familiarity with Seeking Alpha knows that the vast majority of the content there is "material of unclear origin." They'll publish just about anybody, and nobody complains until someone makes a short case convincing enough to send the stock down 12 percent.

I have no idea whether the guy is right or wrong, but this is a prime example of the business media's incredible bias against short sellers. If some guy writes something hyping the bejesus out of some crummy stock, no one cares. And if he's convincing enough to move the stock, nobody at Barron's gets all huffy about the author's murky origins. But short sellers are presumed to be so nefarious and all powerful that some shmoe at a hedge fund will probably get investigated by the SEC for market manipulation because he wrote something negative on a website... even though he disclosed his position!

What should make Eric Savitz queasy is that this no-name is providing market-moving analysis for free while Savitz gets paid by the country's most hallowed financial magazine to write blog posts that consist of mostly, and I'm not kidding here: "What's up with [Tech Stock X]? It's down a lot today and I don't see any news!"

When Savitz does track down this evildoer, maybe he can get some research tips.

Makes him look older

Dana Goldstein sees in a NYT interview reasons why Charlie Crist won't be John McCain's VP pick, and they basically boil down to him not being sufficiently socially conservative. There's also the speculation that Gov. Crist is teh gay, which I suppose is the very antithesis of social conservatism (at least in theory).

I happen to agree that Crist is not a real possibility despite his invitation to McCain's veepstakes BBQ (why not make Florida voters happy?), but it has nothing to do with his political views.

It's that deep, deep, orangy tan of his (almost Mozilo-esque). And the white hair makes it worse, because unlike Tim Pawlenty, who is clearly a much younger man than John McCain, Crist looks like an extremely well preserved older man... which makes for a less flattering comparison.

Pelfrey has solid outing at Coors

Despite walking five in 5.2 innings, Mike Pelfrey kept the Rockies off the board and the Mets held on to win and move back to .500 for the season.

Respectable 4.30 ERA aside, it's hard to get excited about Pelfrey with those peripherals. 43 K/37 BB in 81.2 IP is pretty horrible. The secret seems to be allowing extremely few home runs. He's only given up 4 so far, which makes sense given that he's a sinkerball pitcher. Unfortunately, his GB/FB ratio is a decidedly un-Webb-like 1.48, so the home runs could come after all.

But today, he was good.

"Headwinds"

I have a new least favorite pundit tic: that John McCain really should be trailing by at least 10 points due to the "headwinds" of Republican unpopularity, the unpopularity of the war, and the economy. Both John Harwood and Andrea Mitchell used the term this morning on MTP, in the course of explaining why Obama really should have a massive lead because he's got the unfair advantage of being a Democrat.

Now, the economy is a legitimate headwind for a Republican, in that I think the incumbent political party does not deserve to be held accountable for it to the extent they are. But John McCain was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War, and his only criticism of it was that we hadn't committed enough troops. So if the majority of Americans believe it's been a disaster and was a bad idea to boot, as they do, it's not "bad luck" for John McCain. It's a rejection of John McCain's foreign policy.

But he said mean things about Donald Rumsfeld, so he's been "less wrong than most."

Funny

By watertiger, via Thers.

Mets hire Wayne Krivsky as a "special assistant"

Former/sacked Cincinnati general manager Wayne Krivsky has been hired by the Mets to act as a special assistant to Omar Minaya.

When Krivsky was fired back in late April after a 9-12 start, I emailed my Reds fan uncle to inquire as to why. His response:

I think you can explain the Krivsky firing with one word - Mike Stanton. There has been speculation that the owner, Castellini, was really peeved that they had to eat his millions before the season started. And overpaying Patterson, even though he is a Baker guy, probably did not set too well either.

I've got nothing good to say about giving Mike Stanton serious money or (over)paying Corey Patterson, and it was actually made worse by the fact that he's a Baker guy, but the reason Patterson's presence in center was so galling was because of Jay Bruce, and Krivsky was the guy who drafted Bruce. He also knew that current league ERA and strikeout leader Edinson Volquez was someone worth acquiring, even though the purchase price (Josh Hamilton) turned out to be much higher than expected.

Whatever his talents as a baseball executive, it does seem strange that at a time when the Mets seem to be in housecleaning mode, they've brought a guy who was very recently a major league GM into the front office to "assist" Minaya.

Nate Silver has a political blog

Last night I ran across a link to a post at FiveThirtyEight.com, a political blog by Nate Silver. The same Nate Silver who wrote for Baseball Prospectus and designed the industry-leading PECOTA projection system? The same! I'm quite excited. Apparently he blogged anonymously until May 30 of this year, when he unmasked himself as a necessary precursor to getting wider distribution by some big media enterprise or another.

For those who don't know, BP's core product is a quantitatively-oriented baseball analysis, and when you click on one of their player pages you see a lot of charts like the one above.

That's from Milton Bradley's page, and shows the distribution of historical seasons for the players he most closely ressembles, with the y-axis representing playing time (plate appearances) and the x-axis representing quality (in the form of a catch-all offensive statistic they call Equivalent Average).

His political analysis gives the same treatment to polling data. As he put it in the aforementioned post: "What we do over there and what I'm doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries." And it's very true, at least if you're just talking about horserace politics. Policy seems to have a way of being less data-driven, but in baseball as in horserace, the key question is Win Expectancy. All subcategories (home runs, steals, white women, hispanic seniors) are all fodder for the overarching question of how likely a given team or candidate is to win.

Having been a BP reader for many years, I have a lot of faith in his quantitative game, and he apparently gives Obama a 76.3% chance of victory. That's slightly higher than I would have guessed, but I don't know how much it fluctuates with new polling data. If it's in there, the new Newsweek poll that has him up by a whopping 15 may be juicing that a little bit.

He's also an Obama supporter, which means to whatever extent there's an editorial slant (and my guess is it will be minimal) it will probably make the blog more enjoyable. So he's in the ol' RSS reader already.

This morning he did a post on yesterday's FISA vote, and found that the 32 House Democrats in districts designated as competitive voted overwhelmingly for capitulation while the rest of the caucus voted 120-82 against. That in itself is not at all surprising. Districts that were competitive in 2006 tend to be pretty darn reddish, and the blue seats tend to be held by Blue Dogs like Shuler, Carney and Ellsworth. The kind of Democrats that electoral pragmatists would have us live with and not challenge from the left.

The more interesting point was relating the votes of this subgroup to Obama's decision to support the bill: "Was he really going to run afoul of the Blue Dogs when they are probably his swing voters in passing some version of national health care legislation?" He also points out that Pelosi herself was very much on board with capitulation, and she's no Blue Dog. So there's the intramural explanation for his position that focuses not on Obama's reluctance to alienate swing voters in November but Congressional swing voters in early 2009, and it gets more appealing as a justification the more you discount November swing voters' awareness of the FISA issue at all.

My problem with it is that it could be used in any circumstance to justify agreement with the right wing of the Democratic party. On any unambiguously liberal legislative effort, the Blue Dogs are going to be the whiny ones who worry about being called Communists. That goes for health care, taxes, Social Security, carbon emissions... you name it. How big a Congressional majority will he need before he'll be comfortable telling the Blue Dog Caucus to get bent? Because that's what it comes down to, for me.

Worse than I expected

Yesterday I wrote that while I hoped Barack Obama would come out against the FISA "compromise" legislation, I didn't think he would do it. Well today he made a statement on the bill's passage in the House and boy did he not do it. It was enough to earn Atrios' "Wanker of the Day", for I believe for the first time ever, and deservedly so.

By way of throwing a bone to his anti-illegal spying base, he acknowledges the obvious:

"There is... little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders."

Then he moves on to previous positions he's taken that we agree with:

"That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past."

Operative phrase: "in the past." But if he supports today's bill, it must have some pretty great stuff in it:

"Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance - making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people."

The thing is, though, that FISA doesn't really need "restoration" as the exclusive means to conduct (electronic) surveillance. It has this thing in it called an "exclusivity provision," so it kind of came pre-restored. And to just about everybody outside the Bush administration, and a goodly number of people in it, including his Attorney General, it was already pretty clear that the president can't "circumvent" it.

It's time to break the news:

"It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."

Hmmm... Wouldn't a good way of seeking full accountability for past offenses be to oppose any legislation that grants retroactive immunity? I mean that may be a little inside the box, butI think there's something to it.

Anyway as I said I didn't expect him to take a stand against the bill, so I shouldn't act all shocked, but right at the end the statement takes a hard turn from the ineffectual to the pernicious:

"It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise..."

Emphasis mine, because it's so awful. The problem, of course, is not that he believes we face legitimate threats. It's that everyone believes we face legitimate threats! After claiming to share the very concerns of the people who oppose the bill, he turns around and depicts the debate over it as being between terrorism believers and terrorism skeptics, with the latter endangering America.

So yeah, wankery indeed. I'm setting pretty modest expectations here, Barack. I sure hope the estimates for political courage don't need to be revised further downward.

Brian Williams to host MTP on Sunday

The LA Times is reporting that NBC anchor Brian Williams will host Meet the Press this Sunday. The president of NBC News says that they are still mulling their options for a permanent successor, and Williams isn't necessarily it.

I really hope it's not. I'm having a hard time putting my finger one really good justification for my dislike of Brian Williams, but the individually insufficient reasons include pomposity, scraping deference to Republicans, overeagerness to ingratiate himself to the audience personally, and make-your-teeth hurt corniness.

Of the frequently talked-about candidates, I have to say Matthews would be my preference. His tendency to say surprisingly sexist and/or racist things is a drawback, to be sure. Still, he's the only other "tough interviewer" in the bunch. Well there's David Gregory, but all the stuff I don't like about Williams applies to him, too, just with slightly less Republican-love and more(!) pomposity. Sometimes I think Joe Scarborough has finally seen the light, but it burns and these days he's too angry to be on camera for very long.

Anyway regardless of the merits Matthews would seem to be the heir apparent and he already does The Chris Matthews show in the slot before MTP. They wouldn't even have to play musical chairs with any other shows.

However it shakes out I hope they give Rachel Maddow a damn show.

"First since Watergate"

So Obama's opting out of public financing. No real surprise here. He had said he wouldn't, but then started raising cash by the truckload and had second thoughts. This is on balance an excellent thing, but it does require giving John McCain a golden opportunity to turn the sanctimony meter to 11.

I doubt that this is going to be a big deal, but it's kind of unfortunate that the AP (no link in solidarity with bloggers everywhere) is running the subhead "First since Watergate" which is prominently featured on Drudge, and which McCain used in his response. It's just bad luck for Obama that the rule happened to have been implemented in the wake of the original "-gate," as what he's doing, even though he said he wouldn't do it, is perfectly legal.

Unlike, say, what John McCain did when he opted into matching funds (to get the money and bypass the signature requirement) and then tried to get out once his campaign was solvent again. His request wasn't granted, but he continued to spend beyond the limit anyway! Sure, Obama didn't do what he said he'd do, and that's bad. But it's absurd that McCain can still play offense on the issue of campaign finance. He may have broken the McCain-Feingold Act.

FISA Capitulation

Well it looks like retroactive immunity for the telcos is locked and loaded, which is great because we really don't want private companies having any qualms about breaking the law if they're asked to do so by the executive branch. We want the rails to be greased the next time an administration decides it wants to completely flout duly enacted laws but needs the private sector's help in doing so.

Greenwald is all over this, as he has been since the warrantless surveillance program was reported by the NYT in 2004, and a lot of people are joining him in calling on Obama to come out and call this the travesty it is. 

I'd love it if he did. I'm betting that he won't. It's completely fucking wrong, and he knows it, but he may not deem it worth spending any capital on. Caring about the preservation of the Constitution has somehow become the province of the lunatic fringe in American politics, as defined as Daily Kos readers and Ron Paul supporters, and Barack's got a general election to win. C'est la guerre.

Mets win?

When I retired for the evening, Oliver Perez had just coughed up the lead and was threatening to put on one of his patented fireworks displays. But lo, it appears that Damion Easley capped a comeback late in the game, and established that Jerry Manuel knows how to win games in a way that Willie Randolph never did... or at least the first part.

I got the happy recap from Amazin' Avenue, which has improved a lot since last time I was posting regularly. I'm a sucker for win expectancy charts.

Menomena: Evil Bee

I discovered this video on pitchfork.tv, a relatively new site which I frequent partly to scout out the fresh idie jams and partly to build up a tolerance for hipster culture, which is becoming a necessity in my neighborhood. A lot of the content they put up is long-form documentaries on bands which are now defunct but, the viewer learns, used to kick 10x more ass than any current bands ever could.

Anyway these guys are good, and it's apparently pronounced "meh-NOM-eh-NUH."

Night of the Long Knives

Well, it's over. The Mets are kind of a dysfunctional organization, as it turns out. They called Willie in for that meeting which they said publicly was largely because of his "they're after me because I'm black" comments. (His most hilarious evidence: Everyone wants Isaiah Thomas fired, too!). They apparently wanted to assure the "white working class" segment of the fanbase that such insolence would not be tolerated, but they also said Willie was staying, even though that was obviously not going to be true if they kept losing on even a semi-regular basis. The headline I saw this morning was "Mets Handle Randolph Firing Like a Bunch of Cowards", which seems right.

Anyway I'm happy about it because I really don't care who the manager is, just as long as I don't have to hear a lot of manager controversy, and I think Willie was kind of a buffoon and not a great tactician.

MN - Sen

TPM has an update. I hadn't realized that Jesse Ventura was thinking of joining Coleman and Franken in a three-way race. If that were to happen, I wouldn't envy Coleman's campaign manager. How do you gameplan for a Senate race against Stuart Smalley and The Body? Talk about uncharted territory.

"Vote for Norm Coleman: No Speedos, No Jokes"

"Coleman: Because Novelty Wears Off"

"Keep Minnesota Norm-al"

So I guess I do envy Coleman's campaign manager. That'd be fun. Of course, he may very well lose. Franken seems to have stubbed his toe pretty badly with this back taxes thing, and yet he's still well within striking distance in a two-man race. Plus, he's a very smart guy, and he can do earnest without seeming like he's really smirking on the inside. So it would be nice if Ventura sat it out, because the race could be pivotal and it wouldn't redound to Al's benefit to have it turn into a full-blown circus.

Wagner and other reasons for despair

Three blown saves in a row? It's not like they were all one run leads, either.

Things are looking pretty bleak. As good as Wright, Santana and Reyes are, this just doesn't look like a team that's woefully underperforming its potential at 31-34. Beltran has spent too much of his career as a Met making outs to think he's a lock to turn things around. Delgado is done. Even with Pedro ostensibly "back," we're relying on Oliver Perez, Mike Pelfrey, and the Brewers' leftovers to fill out our rotation. As for depth at the power positions? We've started Damion Easley at first base, and some guy from Binghamton who I'd never heard of in left field.

And the Phillies are looking pretty good. I'm not saying they can't come back and make the playoffs, but they need vastly improved production from their non-elite players, and I have a hard time seeing it happening.

In short: Booooo!